Volume XV: The Falcon’s Flight

“This day, fellow Khans, will be remembered years from now as the dawning of mankind’s rebirth… We are returning; we are the sun of righteousness that will illuminate those who dream of peace, and burn to ashes the demons and devils responsible for the darkness.”
- Khan Elias Crichell, to the Clan Grand Council, November 3048

If one were to ask any Jade Falcon what one single event defined the Jade Falcon Clan, the answer would be Operation Revival, the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere. No other event, they say, comes close – not even the Jihad, or the Clan Civil Wars that soon followed. To the warriors of this proud and traditional Clan, Revival was the inevitable culmination of three centuries in preparations toward a goal that many in the Clans believe was divinely preordained. When the Falcon and Smoke Jaguar Khans finally swayed the Grand Council to that fateful “go vote” in 3048, it was the realization of destiny, the return to the hallowed worlds lost to the ancestors of the Clans. The time had finally come for the barbarians who tarnished the name of the Star League to face the just fruits of their decadent labors.

For the Jade Falcons, it was a homecoming that was long, long overdue.

By June of 3059, the Jade Falcons joined with the Clans Ghost Bear, Smoke Jaguar, and Wolf for the trek across more than a thousand light years, loaded with the best troops three centuries of selective breeding and brutal, birth-to-death training could forge. A year later, the Flacon flag flew over 26 systems once belonging to the Federated Commonwealth, and a host of Periphery worlds. By the time of the Tukayyid Truce in 3052, 19 more would fall, establishing a sliver of space today still known as the Jade Falcon Occupation Zone.

In just two years of fighting, the Clans overwhelmed nearly a full quarter of the Inner Sphere, forever changing a map that had remained virtually static since the collapse of the Star League (excepting the formation of the Federated Commonwealth and Free Rasalhague Republic, of course). The battles were fierce, with Jade Falcon officers bidding against one another for the right to claim each world with the least casualties, the trying to overcome the defending forces without resorting to the “barbaric” tactics of the Inner Sphere. Falcon warriors commented time and again on the ease of their victories, and dismissed as aberrations the very few defeats they suffered. One Star Admiral even summed up the sentiments by scoffing calls from other Clan leaders for caution as the invasion dragged on: “…We are the Clans,” he said. “We shall triumph in the name of the Star League. Caution? Let us throw caution to the Wolves…”

For the Jade Falcons, the 15-year truce won by ComStar at the Battle of Tukayyid was a cataclysmic end to their way of life, and as many would tell you the invasion defined their Clan, those same people would proclaim that fateful 21-day proxy battle for Terra as the turning point. After Tukayyid, nothing would ever be the same for the Clan, and among such staunch traditionalists, change was death. The Battle of Tukayyid was at once the Falcons’ finest hour and its blackest day, with victory so near, yet so unforgivably far. Those who fell that day were heroes, fighting for the Clan; those who did not were failures who seethed with rage for a fate denied them.

Remember those events that brought us these fifteen years of shame.
But remember also those who fell to restore the glorious Star League.
Above all, remember the blood legacy of Aidan Pryde, child of Kerensky;
He made the final sacrifice so that the Clan could continue.
For eternity, we shall praise him; in fifteen years, we shall avenge him.
-- The Remembrance (Clan Jade Falcon), Passage 417, 29:74-79

In the wake of their historic defeat, the Falcon leaders sought every means possible to repudiate the Tukayyid Truce. Rumors to this day even persist that then-Khan Vandervahn Chistu authorized a covert mission by a “bandit” force to raid the Inner Sphere, heading past the truce line, not only to demonstrate Inner Sphere inferiority, but to shatter the tenuous peace. They championed the fall of ilKhan Ulric Kerensky, and fell upon the Wolves in the so-called Refusal War, claiming a Pyrrhic victory. Even in the effort to avoid Absorption by another Clan in their weakened state, the Jade Flacons assailed the Lyran planet Coventry, a conflict that had the collected leaders of the Inner Sphere bracing for all-out war.

Under Khan Marthe Pryde, these years even saw a change in the Falcons’ vaunted rigidity. The Trial of Position for the newest generation of warriors was now a live-field kill of a Spheroid opponent, rather than the ritualized and controlled arena-like battlefield environment. Freeborns rose in stature to fill the ranks of a depleted Touman. The most monumental allowance was the allowance of a freeborn warrior to claim a hallowed Bloodname. Some hailed these years as an age of progress for the Falcons, but warriors a generation later would see these events merely as necessary evils, and further proof of the corrupting influence of the Inner Sphere. This cycle continues to this day, with the debate among the Falcons of whether freebirths have the right to participate in a Trial of Bloodright as hotly contested as it was almost a century ago.

It’s hard, I imagine, for anyone in the Inner Sphere to understand the Jade Falcons because their concept of tradition is just so strong. Anything that forces them to change or deviate from what they regard as the will of Kerensky is resented. Where people on Inner Sphere worlds would hail the events of the late 3050s and 3060s as a time of change and growth – especially after the ejection of the Steel Vipers, who briefly shared their occupation zone when they were called in to reinforce the invasion – the Falcons themselves felt they had tarnished their own reputation. Passages in the Remembrance during that era are filled with bile and disgust, all aimed at the Inner Sphere or Clan Wolf, the two main influences on the Khan’s decisions. And even though the Falcons did their part and helped the coalition under Devlin Stone resist the Word of Blake Jihad, the Clan clearly felt that the entire affair was the Inner Sphere’s own just rewards for their corruption and power lust…
--Sean Lasko, PhD, Professor of Clan Society and Politics, University of Thorin.

The fires of the Jihad left none untouched, not even the Jade Falcon Clan. Blakist terror agents and strike forces loyal to the fanatics appeared in the Clan’s territory, waging a war on civilian and warrior castes alike, using underhanded tactics and weapons not seen even during the invasion of the Inner Sphere almost twenty years before. At the same time, Clan Wolf lunged forward soon after the original Truce of Tukayyid expired, launching a “liberation” of the Inner Sphere worlds now terrorized by the Word, and cutting off the Falcon corridor toward Terra. More insult to injury came when Clan Hell’s Horses arrived from the home worlds en masse, their forces rolling over the weaker garrisons of both the Falcon and Wolf occupation zones. Though they would later on help to repel the Ice Hellion Encroachment, the Falcons and the Horses remain at odds today.

Then came what some experts have called the Homeworlds Civil War. Evidence does not prove conclusively what truly happened in the Clan homeworlds – or even if it was a civil war at all – but many have speculated about it ever since. The events surrounding what has, in effect, cut the Invading Clans off from their roots on Strana Mechty, remain a mystery, but enough clues have been revealed in the decades since to suggest some mass combat took place out there. Whatever happened, some say, was far more devastating, than even the so-called Wars of Possession of the 3060s, which followed the loss of the Ghost Bears, Nova Cats, and Smoke Jaguars from Clan space. Even the Jade Falcon Remembrance says little of this mysterious, yet monumental event, save to promise Falcons will one day return to those lost worlds and bring enlightenment back to their “lost brethren”, just as they claim they have returned to the Inner Sphere.

In our final installment on the Jade Falcons, we will look at the Clan today, after the upheavals of the Jihad, and the Trials that followed. Please join us as we continue our tour of the stars! I’m Bertram Habeas.